refining the "pathos of distance" politeness

A huge percentage of communication is non-verbal, non-concious for most people. An anthropologist called Birdwhistle (no joke) estimated it to be about 70%. Not sure how one would come up with such a number, because it seems very difficult to know exactly what is being communicated when two human beings interact.

On the other hand, it's interesting to consider that non-verbal communication operates by something similar to what you describe.

nominative              ve        she         he 
accusative              ver       her         him 
possessive              vis       her         his 

it (still) strips away a lot of it but nevertheless it's an ace medium for all sort of discourses conducted with reasonable arguments. an important goal of the "pathos of distance" politeness is to free information to accelerate memetic evolution

when infact human evolution is naturally a much richer thing than that if you just leave it to itself.

as soon as you can predict it is no longer true evolution. creating something new implies spontenaity.

haven't you read any godel?

(you wrote 4 posts while I wrote this one and i have to go to sleep soon so i'll answer tomorrow)

A tiger with an item of food.

as long as everybody have the choice to live forever or not :-)
but that's another story...

it's manifest teleonomy or exponential growth of the research grant of those with the biggest ego and the least consideration for balance.

Those people sure are going at it the wrong way. Fortunately other people are proposing a different model of behavior by asking themselves what would take to only have benefits all around, i'm thinking of people like Yudkowsky and Anders Sandberg, who happen to be the most self-less (but realist about their talent), happy, considerate people i've ever encountered online.

the logical inconsistency of the idea of accelerating evolution, which implies that evolution is something that can be predicted and measured.

I wrote "accelerate memetic evolution", wich incidently is all about debunking logical inconsistencies. memetic evolution is not subjected to the same constraints as biological evolution... this is an interesting digression but i would like this thread to stay on the topic of politeness as intended in my first post if you please.

To put it differently the goal of this idea is to give a communicational tool for people who want to optimize their messages for information: this is perfect for technical things. (Professor Richard Feynman of Caltech gave up on learning japanese for a similar reason.) People who are inteested to post under the "pathos of distance" rules of politeness should say so on this thread.

ps maybe i should use this Kanji as an ironic blazon ;-)

This from someone who spent a couple of years in Feynmanland, though I got there after he had passed away.

Kanji are a good example of the limitations of simplistic information measures. I wish I was much more fluent with kanji than I am because it would open a huge literature, with a completely different but highly evolved way of looking at things than is available to me in European languages. A way of looking at things that I don't think I would get from any local optimization of messages in alphanumeric characters. This may be related to the politeness issue, because politeness is about a shared code, gesture, style etc... What is the information content of a tea ceremony? It highlights precisely the limitations of ignoring context in oversimplistic models of information.

I take memetic evolution as a simple but interesting and powerful model of cultural evolution. Just keep in mind that it is an approximation, and limited.

WRT to my posts, Caveat Emptor!

iamwhomiam, to paraphrase the sheepman. posting under a pseudonym because of google etc...

yes, reached ilx via momus.

a friend of momus is a friend of mine.

wait a sec ... does momus have any friends?

iamwhomiam, to paraphrase the sheepman. posting under a pseudonym because of google etc...

*bows in acknowledgement*

btw we're not very polite guests of sebastien's thread are we?

perhaps this thread should be "how many ways can you think of to be rude to sebastien?" (no offense sebastien)

here's another Currie poet

Diane Currie - Public Speaker, Educator, Radical Poet

wonder if she's any relation to Momus?

Obviously, don't declare yourself to be operating by (the "pathos of distance" politeness) unless you have that kind of mental discipline.

I think that if you are really operating under that principle, then declaring it to others at all is counterproductive.

I don't operate under that principle, btw.

or do I? *wink*

Sebastien - sorry about your thread.

de wa, o-saki ni, shitsurei itashimasu.

it's all roofing in herre :-)
i thought that thread had bombed so i didn't checked too often after my last post.

Caveat Emptor! Feynman may also have had other reasons for giving up on Japanese: it is difficult and takes time.
This from someone who spent a couple of years in Feynmanland, though I got there after he had passed away.

i only know about the anecdote reported at the bottom of this page

Kanji are a good example of the limitations of simplistic information measures.(...)

i enjoyed that post, thank you for the insight.

but this isn't how it actually works. online communication leaves out a lot of the aspects of human communication in the record, but I think you'd find it difficult to find someone who actually reads and posts in this forum and doesn't add in substitute vox, quirks, facial expressions etc. when perusing the posts of others. Once again I am completely in disagreement with your high-falutin' goals. Online communication is just another pony express or a telephone. You can't go ascribing miracle powers to it as in the comment above. It's limited, and we are limited, and the result is nothing more than what humans are capable of to begin with.

felicity, thank you for giving me the chance to elaborate on this point. maybe you are right, the public declaration part might be dropped. it would have more panache that's for sure but i'll have to think about it some more.
One of the reason I decided to keep it at least for the first round was that i thought it would be useful in certain cases, for an example if a random googlx0r arrives here (or on another forum) and read a thread or a post from me and get the urge to destroy/improve one of it's memes but didn't read enough to get an impression of who i am, what do i want and what do i have to offer etc, the person might hold back and i'll loose. But if the person would click on my profile and read that i operate under the "pathos of distance" politeness rules, click on the link that point to this very thread (or to an edited static version of the concept if i ever write one), and from there understand that i won't mind if ve hit me with all ve got @ debating my arguments because it'll make me a better person. I have to say, i think this example is somewhat crude so that's why i added "failing the other, forgetting vis desire , neglecting vis pleasure, it is to produce immidiately a displeasure. the sanction is consubstantial to the faulty deed."

the concept will be more harmonious when I'll really understand what i'm on about, your attention helped and is a pleasure to me :-)

blank satire

Unlike those lowly Utilitarians, who think that virtue consists in scrabbling about with all that is contingent and changeable, small and close up, we believe that virtue has always come from people making 'rank defining' judgements which define the value hierarchy of things once and for all, distant from the daily haggle of contingencies. This relates to the Will to Power, and to the distinction between the Overman and the Hoard.

Nietzsche is contrasting Utilitarianism with an aristocratic idealism. He's also contrasting feudal with commercial society, and contrasting the anglo-saxon emphasis on empiricism and commerce -- the actual and the factual -- with the continental tradition of a priori or ideological thought, a distinction that continues to this day. It can sound fascist, but of course there are elements of this which have attracted anti-authoritarians like Foucault and Badiou, keen to get liberalism out of the cul-de-sac it entered with relativism, which refuses the (necessary) construction of a hierarchy of values (every judgement, after all, must be, in some sense, the end of tolerance).

How you connect this with netiquette and politeness is where I fail to follow. Are you saying that if someone has become a Nietzschean ubermensch in the sense of having arrived at an ideology, a hierarchy of values which they believe is for the good and for all time, they should not fear conflict or contradiction? They should treat others as similar beings, rather than prefacing every statement, every contradiction, with 'No disrespect to you, but I disagree?'

And if we were to promote this kind of unapologetic assertion, this return to admissions of situatedness and this acknowledgement that every position carries within it a hierarchy of values, a judgement, why would we need gender neutral pronouns like ve, ver and vis, which seem to want to postpone, defer and disguise judgement?

'And if we were to promote this kind of unapologetic assertion, this acknowledgement that every position carries within it a hierarchy of values, a judgement, why would we need gender neutral pronouns like ve, ver and vis, which seem to want to postpone, defer and disguise judgement?'

The answer to this, in that case, might be: because gender is merely circumstantial, contingent. It is not part of my hierarchy of values, my ideology. And this is where the arguments at the beginning of the thread make sense. Sure, your gender might be irrelevant online, but in real life it would be absurd to say that I could suspend consideration of your gender when talking to you, no matter how hard I tried.

(I will elaborate on netiquette later on when a problem I have with my login name and my stats will be fixed)

Ah, you're the same no-nonsense Felicity who said in response to one of my posts on the 'How do you feel about ilxor' thread:

No, I do not recognize that scenario because I can tell the difference between people and remember who said what.

It's good of you to sweep away all the confusion and clutter in my thoughts and make everything so cut-and-dried. You're obviously thinking (but not saying) 'noblesse oblige' quite a lot!